The Coffee Break. 14 August 2014.

Hello folks;

Been gone for the past few days: sick and also working on other projects of my own (yes I can work while I am sick: it is only desk work)(humor intended). Whatever the case, time to bring you another coffee break for the 14th of August 2014. Recently I have gotten back into both Guild Wars 2, and The Old Republic. While not much has changed – at least nothing major like combat mechanics and so on – I have found a renewed sense of discovery when I booted up these two games for the first time in a long time.

When it comes to Guild Wars 2 the major attraction for me at this point is the World verses World: massive fantasy battles where servers fight one another for supremacy and leader board scores. Yes indeed I have finally gotten my act together and located a guild that does strictly World verses World: something I have not gotten around to doing earlier when I was starting out in the world of Tyria. Suffice it to say it has been an wonderful experience thus far. Talking to the guild over a program called Teamspeak, along with other groups whenever the guild is not doing world verses world, is a nice change of pace from the – what I like to call – “mute teamwork” that goes on in Battlefield 3 and 4 (Origin’s game time program lets you try out full games for a limited period of time). Indeed Totalbiscuit’s words related to Planetside 2 can also be carried over to a game such as Guild Wars 2: soloing is fun, but having an outfit (guild) to tag along with will enhance the experience even more, and make the game all that more enjoyable.

Moving along, The Old Republic is set to release its Galactic Strongholds expansion soon – specifically sometime this month. Now having a look at some footage on Youtube, I can say with certainty now that I am quite looking forward to the new expansion. Player housing adds a bit of flavour to the mix, and since the game is mainly PVE-focused (player verses environment), having a “home” to fall back to (sorry starship, you are not a proper home) will be a nice change of pace from the fleet of the respective factions. Currently I am running around as the Republic Trooper, and while I still favour the Empire a bit more than the Republic, doing the Kingpin Bounty Contracts as a Trooper is quite entertaining to say the least. Apparently in the game, the Empire endorses the Bounty Brokers Association (BBA), while the Republic recently legalized them to carry out bounties in Republic space as part of a “tough-on-crime” bill. Regardless, now my soldier can relax and go off to hunt some criminal scum and keep the Republic clean and shiny: also carbonite freezing is illegal in the Republic due to environmental protection laws, but killing, blowing up, and similar are perfectly reasonable tactics – I love this game!!

Aside from the two games, I have taken a look into a cursor lock program for PC gaming since my Bad Company 2’s mouse cursor keeps clicking on my taskbar: a behaviour I found really irritating. After some tinkering the program was up and running, and my taskbar is no longer interfering with my game. Though to be honest after cursor-locking the game, I still had the issue with the taskbar being selected: turns out moving it off to either the left or the right fixes this problem: simple things we overlook (humor intended). The game not having a windowed mode as part of the main options, I had to go into the .ini files to play around with the settings in order to achieve windowed mode. Thus whenever the game ran it would not run in front of the taskbar, not unlike games such as Borderlands 2 and TOR where windowed mode and borderless windowed mode both cover the taskbar and push the program to the forefront due to it being available under the options tab in-game. Whatever the case now my high-speed combat will maintain it’s pseudo-twitch style, and my taskbar can stop attempting to grab my attention like a four year-old who does not know the meaning of: “I am busy.”

Okay folks that is enough from me for this 14th of August 2014. Have fun, take care out there, and I shall see you next time.